The U.S. Navy is once again up to its neck in a sexual harassment controversy.

Captain Everett Greene is by all accounts an outstanding officer. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1970 and became the first African-American officer in the SEALs, the Navy’s elite commando unit. He accomplished this even though he could barely swim, a testament to his determination. SEALs have to be able to swim well, as many of their missions involve swimming in the ocean to reach their target; poor swimmers need to improve quickly in order to pass through the training course. He made the list for promotion to admiral, and was set to become the commander of all the Navy’s SEAL units.

But, in 1993 two women came forward with sexual harassment charges, and Greene’s career is effectively over. A court-martial is currently underway, and the results of it will be known within the next two weeks. What makes the case disturbing is that Greene allegedly harassed the women while he was head of a unit charged with fighting sexual harassment in the Navy following the infamous Tailhook scandal in 1991. Irony, ahoy. Both sides agree with the fact that Greene never touched either of the women, but he did send them suggestive and disturbing letters and notes.

Greene and his lawyers are trying to put a racial spin on the affair. They say that the Adm. Joseph Prueher and others involved in the case have shown racial bias by prosecuting Greene’s case more aggressively than similar cases involving white officers. That may be true, but there is a more important point to consider: if Greene had not sent poems with lines like “Whenever you need to be adored, I’ll be there” to them, then none of this would be happening. He also apparently misread the intentions of a female subordinate who consoled Greene after he became distraught when talking about his wife. He wrote, “What you offered to do with me was very special, very precious. I wanted you just as much, if not more, than you wanted me.” The woman, Lt. Mary Felix, denies that she ever sought sex with him.

The whole case points to a serious problem within not just the Navy but the entire military. Women are frequently not seen as comrades by their male counterparts. Ability and competence are overlooked; some men see them as somehow inferior, or as less capable due to their gender. This attitude can then extend to extremes as seen in the Tailhook incident, where Lt. Paula Coughlin, a fellow officer, was treated as a sex object by other Naval aviators. To treat a fellow officer in such a way, with utter contempt and lack of respect, should be unthinkable.

The military prides itself on being a meritocracy. Those who have the ability and determination to succeed will do so, or at least in theory, and they will be treated with proper respect for it. But if this is so, then why are women treated as they were in the Greene case and at the 1991 Tailhook convention?

Clearly, training for military personnel in proper treatment of and relations with their comrades is in order. All members of the military need to see one another as soldiers or sailors or airmen or marines first, and consider gender or race farther down the line.

I grew up around the military, and had the dice rolled a bit differently five years ago, I would now be an Army officer. My experiences with women in Army ROTC and observations I made during my father’s Air Force career indicate that women are perfectly capable of performing whatever mission is at hand.

There was one female cadet at the University of Louisville who was on our Ranger Challenge team and was one of the most hard-driving and downright fearsome individuals I have ever met, and she was fully accepted as a member of the team because her performance was outstanding, plain and simple. She scorched most of the male cadets during a two-mile run test, and showed more guts than anyone else during the grueling weekend which involved a 10-kilometer run in full combat gear through a monstrous Kentucky thunderstorm.

I see no problem, aside from the attitude and perception that can be seen from the cases above, in allowing women into any military specialty including combat arms positions. This is already happening in the Air Force and Navy, where women pilots have been assigned to fighter units.

Integrating the ground forces will be more difficult due to some arbitrary standards for strength, questions about the nature of small-unit bonding (the relationships of members of the unit), and the physical differences between males and females and how this could affect field performance. But all of these problems can be solved, and they should be solved. There are also concerns about the morale effects of women being taken prisoner, but let’s be realistic; everyone in the military knows and understands the risks of the job.

The military will eventually benefit from finally eradicating these attitudes about gender. Of course, the military is just a mirror of society, and these problems also exist in American society at large. But the military can only benefit from an effort to rid itself of such stupid and damaging attitudes as those seen in the Greene case.

Kevin S. Kirby is a senior in journalism mass communication from Louisville, Ky. He has a B.A. in political science from the University of Wyoming.